No enhanced recognition memory, but better source memory for faces of cheaters

Previous studies sought to test for the existence of a "cheater-detection module" by testing for enhanced memory for the faces of cheaters, but past results have been inconclusive. Here, we present four experiments showing that old-new discrimination was not affected by whether a face was associated with a history of cheating, trustworthy or irrelevant behavior. In contrast, source memory for faces associated with a history of cheating (i.e., memory for the cheating context in which the face was encountered) was consistently better than source memory for other types of faces. This pattern held under a variety of conditions, including different types of judgments participants made about the stimulus persons (attractiveness in Experiment 1; likeability in Experiments 2-4), different retention intervals (a few minutes in Experiments 1, 2 and 4; 1 week in Experiment 3), whether the behaviors were exceptional or ordinary (Experiments 1-3) and whether the social status of the characters was low or high (Experiment 4). Given no differences in old-new discrimination, enhanced source memory for faces of cheaters may be useful for avoiding cheaters in future interactions. (C) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.